Recent advances in technology have led to increasingly widespread use of devices that have touch screens for input, such as smart phones, tablets, etc. Experience with such devices has identified typing on touch screens as a significant source of practical problems. For example, one often needs to look at the keys of the touch screen (because they cannot be felt by touch), as opposed to what is being typed. This will undesirably increase typing errors. While most smart phones and tablets have auto-complete or auto-correct features, such auto-completion and auto-correction is also prone to errors and is often inefficient. Thus auto-correction is not a complete solution to touch screen typing problems.
Since tactile feedback is very helpful for typing, various attempts have been made in the art to provide tactile feedback for a touch screen. Generally, conventional tactile feedback approaches for touch screens tend to suffer from one or more of the following significant practical difficulties: excessively low vertical feature height, excessive power consumption by the tactile feedback system, and use of exotic and/or expensive materials.
Accordingly, it would be an advance in the art to provide tactile feedback for touch screens that does not suffer from the above-identified difficulties.